The Secret Keeper (29 page)

He’d tried to make a reservation at one of the fancy restaurants she mooned over these days, the Ritz or Claridge’s, but it turned out they were fully booked and no amount of explanation or appeal could convince them to give him a table. Jimmy had been disappointed at first, and the familiar old feelings of wanting to be better established, richer than he was, came to the surface. He’d pushed them aside, though, and decided it was for the best: he didn’t go in for all that fancy stuff anyway, and on a night as important as this one Jimmy didn’t want to feel he was pretending to be something he wasn’t. Anyway, as his boss had joked, with rationing as it was you could expect to be offered the same Woolton’s Pie at Claridge’s as you’d get at Lyons Corner House, only dearer.

Jimmy looked back at the counter, but Dolly wasn’t there any more. He supposed she was fetching her coat and fixing her lipstick, or one of the other things girls thought they had to do to be beautiful. He wished she wouldn’t; she didn’t need make-up and fancy clothing. They were like veneers, Jimmy sometimes thought, concealing the essence of a person, the very things that made her vulnerable and true and therefore most beautiful to him. Dolly’s complications and imperfections were part of what he loved about her.

Idly, he scratched his upper arm and wondered what had been going on before, why she’d acted so strangely when she saw him. He’d surprised her, he knew, turning up at the kitchen like that, calling out to her when she thought she was alone, hidden away with a cigarette and that distracted dreamy smile on her face. Dolly was usually thrilled at being taken unawares—she was the bravest, most daring person he knew, and nothing made her jumpy—but she’d definitely been nervous when she saw him. She’d seemed a different girl from the one who’d danced beside him through the streets of London the other night, and then led him back to her room.

Unless she had something behind the counter she didn’t want him to see—Jimmy took out his cigarette packet and fed one out onto his lip—a surprise for him perhaps, something she was planning on showing him later at the restaurant. Or maybe he’d caught her remembering their night together, that might explain why she’d seemed so startled, almost embarrassed, when she looked up and saw him standing there. Jimmy struck a match and dragged hard, considering. After a moment he exhaled, letting the query go. It was impossible to guess, and as long as the odd behaviour wasn’t one of her games of pretend (not tonight, please God, he had to stay in control of tonight), he supposed it didn’t matter.

He slipped his hand inside his pocket and then shook his head, because of course the ring box was right where it had been two minutes ago. The compulsion was getting ridiculous; he needed to find a way to distract himself until he could slip the damn thing on Dolly’s finger. Jimmy hadn’t brought a book, so he took up the black folder in which he kept his printed photographs. He didn’t usually carry it with him when he was out on the job, but he’d come straight from a meeting with his editor and hadn’t had time to take it home.

He turned to his most recent photograph, one he’d taken in Cheap- side on Saturday night. It was of a little girl, four or five years old he guessed, standing in front of the kitchen of her local church hall. Her own clothes had been destroyed in the same raid that killed her family, and the Salvation Army hadn’t had any children’s clothes to give her. She was wearing an enormous pair of bloomers, an adult-size cardigan and a pair of tap shoes. They were red and she’d adored them. The St John’s ladies were fussing about in the background, finding biscuits for her, and she’d been tapping her feet like Shirley Temple when Jimmy saw her, as the woman minding her kept an eye on the door in hopes that one of her family would miraculously appear, whole and intact and ready to take her home.

Jimmy had taken so many war pictures, his walls and his memories were clogged with various strangers who stood defiant in the face of devastation and loss; just this week he’d been to Bristol and Portsmouth and Gosport; but there was something about that little girl— he didn’t even know her name—that Jimmy couldn’t forget. He didn’t want to forget. Her little face made happy by so little after suffering what was surely a child’s greatest loss; an absence that would ripple across the years to change her whole life. Jimmy ought to know—he still found himself scanning the faces of bomb-blast victims, searching for his mother.

Small individual tragedies like this little girl’s were nothing to the larger scale of the war; she and her tap shoes could be swept as easily as dust beneath history’s carpet. That photo-graph was real, though; it captured its moment and preserved it for the future like an insect in amber. It reminded Jimmy why what he did, recording the truth of the war, was important. He needed to be reminded sometimes, on nights like this one, when he looked around the room and felt his lack of uniform so keenly.

Jimmy killed his cigarette in the soup bowl that someone be-fore him had helpfully set out for the purpose. He glanced at his watch—fifteen minutes had passed since he’d sat down—and wondered what was keeping Dolly. Jimmy was debating whether to gather his things and go looking for her when he sensed a presence behind him. He turned, expecting to see Doll, but it wasn’t her. It was someone else, someone he’d never seen before.

At last Dolly had managed to extricate herself from Mrs Waddingham, and was coming back through the kitchen, wondering how shoes that looked such a dream could possibly hurt one’s feet so badly, when she glanced up and the world just about stopped turning. Vivien had arrived.

She was standing by one of the trestle tables.

Deep in conversation.

With Jimmy.

Dolly’s heart started to rabbit in her chest and she hid herself behind the pillar at the edge of the kitchen counter. She tried not to be seen while making perfectly sure to see everything. Eyes wide, she peered around the bricks and realised with horror that it was worse than she’d imagined. Not only were the two of them talking together, by the way they were gesturing back towards the table—Dolly stood on tippy-toes and winced—at Jimmy’s folder, open on its surface, she could only deduce that they were discussing his photographs.

He’d shown them to Dolly once, and she’d been horrified. They were awful, nothing at all like those he’d used to take back in Coventry, of sunsets and trees and lovely houses in rippling meadows; neither were they like any of the war newsreels she and Kitty had been to watch at the cinema, the smiling images of returned servicemen, tired and dirty but triumphant; children lined up waving at railway stations; stalwart women handing oranges to cheerful Tommies. Jimmy’s photos were of men with broken bodies and dark hollowed cheeks, and eyes that had seen things they ought not to have seen—Dolly hadn’t known what to say; she’d wished he hadn’t shown them to her in the first place.

What could he be thinking, showing them to Vivien now? She who was so pretty and perfect, the very last person on earth who ought to be troubled by that sort of ugliness. Dolly felt protective of her friend, there was a part of her that wanted to fly over there, slam the folder shut and end the whole thing, but she couldn’t. Jimmy was just as likely to kiss her again, or worse, refer to her as his fiancee and make Vivien think they were engaged. Which they weren’t, not officially— they’d talked about it, of course, back when they were kids, but that was different. They were older now, and the war changed things, it changed people. Dolly swallowed hard: this moment was everything she’d feared most and now that it had happened she had no choice but to wait in excruciating limbo for it all to be over.

It felt like hours passed before Jimmy finally closed his folder and Vivien made to leave. Dolly breathed a huge sigh of relief, and then she panicked. Her friend was coming straight up the aisle between the tables, frowning slightly as she headed for the kitchen. Dolly had been so looking forward to seeing her, but not like this, not before she knew exactly what Jimmy had said. As Vivien neared the kitchen, Dolly made a split-second decision. She ducked down and hid behind the counter, pretending to fossick beneath the red and green Christmas valance with the demeanour of someone engaged in terribly important war business. As soon as she’d felt Vivien brush past, Dolly grabbed her bag and hurried to where Jimmy was waiting. All she could think of was getting him out of the canteen before Vivien saw them together.

They didn’t go to the Lyons Corner House in the end. There was a restaurant by the railway station, a plain building with boarded-up windows and a blast hole patched by a sign that said ‘More Open than Usual’. When they reached it, Dolly declared that she couldn’t possibly walk another step. ‘I’ve blisters, Jimmy,’ she said, feeling like she might be going to cry. ‘Let’s just duck in here, shall we? It’s freezing out—I’m sure it’s going to snow tonight.’

It was warmer inside, thank goodness, and the waiter found them a nice-enough booth in the back with a radiator burning nearby. Jimmy took Dolly’s coat to hang by the door and she unpinned her WVS hat, setting it down by the salt and pepper. One of her grips had been digging into her head all night and she rubbed the spot briskly as she eased off her wretched shoes. Jimmy stopped on his way back and spoke briefly to the waiter who’d seated them, but Dolly was far too preoccupied with what he might have said to Vivien to wonder why. She shook a cigarette out of her packet and struck the match so hard it snapped. She was certain Jimmy was hiding something, he’d been acting nervously ever since they left the canteen, and now, coming back to the table, he could hardly meet her eyes without quickly looking away.

No sooner had he sat down than the waiter brought them a bottle of wine and began pouring two glasses full. The gurgling noise seemed very loud, embarrassing somehow, and Dolly looked beyond Jimmy to take in the rest of the room. Three bored waiters stood muttering to one another in the corner while the bartender polished his clean bar.

There was only one other couple dining, the two of them whispering over their table as Al Jolson crooned from a gramophone on the bar. The woman had an over-eager look about her, rather like Kitty with her new beau—RAF, or so she said—running a hand down the fellow’s shirt and giggling at his jokes.

The waiter set down the bottle and adopted a posh voice, telling them there’d be no a la carte menu tonight due to the shortages, but that the chef could prepare them a set menu du jour.

‘Good,’ said Jimmy, hardly looking at the fellow. ‘Yes, thank you.’

The waiter left and Jimmy lit himself a cigarette, smiling at Dolly briefly before shifting his attention to something just above her head.

Dolly could stand it no longer; her stomach was churning; she had to know what he’d been saying to Vivien, whether he’d mentioned her name. ‘So,’ she said.

‘So.’

‘I was wondering—’

‘There’s something—’

They both stopped, they both dragged on their cigarettes. Each considered the other through a haze of smoke.

‘You first,’ said Jimmy with a smile, opening his hands and looking directly into her eyes in a way she might’ve found exciting if she weren’t so anxious.

Dolly chose her words carefully. ‘I saw you,’ she said, flicking ash into the ashtray, ‘in the canteen. You were talking.’ His face was hard to read; he was watching her closely. ‘You and Vivien,’ she added.

‘That was Vivien?’ said Jimmy, eyes widening. ‘Your new friend? I didn’t realise—she didn’t say her name. Oh, Doll, if you’d only come sooner you could have introduced us.’

He seemed genuinely disappointed, and Dolly breathed a sigh of tentative relief. He hadn’t known Vivien’s name. Maybe that meant she didn’t know his either; nor how he came to be visiting the canteen tonight. She tried to sound nonchalant. ‘What were you talking about then, the two of you?’

‘The war,’ he shrugged a shoulder and dragged nervously on his cigarette. ‘You know. The usual.’

He was lying to her, Dolly could tell—Jimmy wasn’t a good liar. Neither was he enjoying the conversation; he’d answered quickly, too quickly, and now he was avoiding her gaze. What could they possibly have discussed that was making him so cagey. Had they talked about her? Oh God—what had he said? ‘The war,’ she repeated, pausing to give him an opportunity to expand. He didn’t. She offered him a brittle smile. ‘That’s a rather general topic.’

The waiter arrived at their table, sliding a steaming plate before each of them. ‘Mock fish scallops,’ he said grandly.

‘Mock fish scallops?’ Jimmy sputtered.

The waiter’s mouth twitched and his facade slipped a little. ‘Artichokes, I believe, sir,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Chef grows ’em on his allotment.’

Jimmy watched Dolly across the white tablecloth. This was not the way he’d planned it, to propose to her in an empty dive, after buying her crumbed artichoke and sour wine, and making her burn with anger. Silence set up camp between them and the ring box weighed heavily in Jimmy’s trouser pocket. He didn’t want to be arguing, he wanted to be sliding the ring onto her finger, not simply because it bound her to him—though of course he longed for that—but because it honoured something good and true. He poked at his food.